It is the first time in more than two decades that the editorial staff of a major newspaper has openly staged a strike against government censorship.

The decision was made after the newspaper management took over the department’s official microblog account, and issued a statement claiming that a controversial front-page New Year editorial had been written by its staff and was not a last-minute alteration by Guangdong propaganda officials. The management also blamed a blunder in the article on an editor.

The staff later issued a statement via another microblog denying the management’s account and announced a strike. Unlike two previous open letters issued by the department, last night’s statement was signed.

“The statement [on the official microblog] does not represent the opinion of the editorial staff. It is a result of pressure applied by the authorities on the … management,” the department said. “The editorial staff will fight against the falsified statement … Until the issue is resolved, we will not do any editorial work.”

According to an internal account CMP obtained from a source at the Nanfang Daily Group, which publishes a constellation of top magazines and newspapers, including Southern Weekend and Southern Metropolis Daily, an expanded meeting (编委扩大会议) of the editorial committee at Southern Weekly was held at 7 p.m. on Saturday, January 5. The meeting was voluntarily attended by many members of the paper’s editorial staff.

At the meeting, editorial staff demanded that a special investigative team be appointed to look into the “New Year’s Greeting” incident and produce a report to be issued publicly. Wang Genghui (王更辉), the deputy editor of Nanfang Media, and Huang Can (黄灿), a member of the group’s editorial committee and acting editor-in-chief of Southern Weekly, described to those present how the New Year’s special edition of the newspaper had been “altered in violation of the rules” (违规删改), particularly in the addition of an introduction to the edition. They promised that there would be no settling of scores and that the censorship process would be “returned to normal.”

At the insistence of the editorial staff, Wang Genghui and Huang Can agreed to the immediate formation of an investigative team and said they would relay the staff’s demands to their superiors. The meeting concluded at around midnight.

At around 12:30 a.m. yesterday, January 6, editorial staff learned from reliable sources of an instant message (短信) reportedly ordered by Huang Can and passed on by the paper’s general manager, Mao Zhe (毛哲), ordering that a statement be issued via Southern Weekly‘s official Sina Weibo account. The core content of that message was as follows: “The January 3 New Year’s Message and its introduction in the New Year’s edition of this newspaper were written by editors at the paper to conform to the theme of ‘seeking dreams.’”

The deliberate distortion of the truth in the instant message was a shock to the paper’s editors, especially to those editors who had been responsible for the issue in question.

The turmoil at the Guangzhou-based newspaper resonates especially strongly among politically aware Chinese because Mr. Xi chose southern China for a tour after taking power in November. He made a pilgrimage to nearby Shenzhen, where the father of China’s economic reforms, Deng Xiaoping, kick-started them two decades ago.

Indeed, Mr. Xi seems to be casting himself in the mold of Deng, who was known for bold economic reforms but who also brooked no opposition to the rule of the Communist Party.

The latest indication was a speech Mr. Xi made that also was published in newspapers on Sunday. Speaking to senior leaders, Mr. Xi repeatedly invoked Deng, especially on the need to adhere to “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” a phrase often used to mean a combination of pragmatic policies and one-party rule. He also praised the pre-reform era, in what appeared to be an effort to appeal to harder-line Communists.

But part of the reason for the clamor for reforms are hopes that Mr. Xi himself has raised. So far he has won praise by calling for China’s constitutional protections to be put in effect, ordering officials to cut pomp and setting in motion an anticorruption campaign.

It poses an early test of China’s direction under the new leadership of Xi Jinping, who has made strong and seemingly contradictory calls for the country to press forward with reform while also returning to the revolutionary legacy of its Maoist past.

“Everybody knows that the system stands naked and that the system is aware that the public knows that it is naked,” said political commentator Zhang Lifan, who is close to several liberal-leaning “princeling” children of revolutionary leaders.

“The question is whether it wants to put on clothes, or not,” he said.